Nokia is making deals with all sorts of companies for the use of its mapping technology Navteq, and Oracle is the latest to jump on the bandwagon.

Not many details are known about the Nokia/Oracle partnership other than the fact that it was made official at the Oracle OpenWorld conference. Oracle is planning to add Nokia's mapping tech to its applications.

Aside from Oracle, Nokia has struck mapping deals with auto companies like BMW, Volkswagen, Korean Hyundai and Mercedes. These automakers plan to use Navteq in some of their vehicles. Navteq will also be used in Garmin's transit services and a new Urban Guidance feature in its Navigon app.

In addition, Nokia recently partnered with Amazon to provide mapping services for the e-tailer's latest Kindle line, Kindle Fire HD. This line consists of a refreshed 7-inch model for $199, an 8.9-inch model for $299 and a 4G LTE model for $499. Amazon is also offering a 250 MB of bandwidth per month, 20 GB of cloud storage and $10 in Appstore credit for $50 per year.

A huge advocate of Nokia's mapping technology will be Microsoft's Windows 8, which will be released on October 26. This makes sense, since Nokia is the main hardware maker for Windows Phones, but it's hoping to use Navteq and the new OS to compete successfully with Apple iPhone/iOS and Google's Android-powered phones.

It kind of misses the point though--Navteq is best compared to TomTom (formerly TeleAtlas) in that it is a data source that was built for embedded and then brought to scale up to having live elements rather than Google's reversed approach.

Offline mapping is neat but it's really not as useful as a lot of people might think. First off it's downright useless for any POI or search type stuff since the embedded POI data is garbage and it's really hard to do embedded search without massive indexes that don't fit in the embedded model (just try a non-connected navigation product already on the market to see what I mean) and you end up providing very different quality of results depending on whether you are pointing to the embedded or "live" data.

Google doesn't have this problem because they only cache the MAPS offline, not the POI data. And that's very smart of them--trying to keep POI data fresh on a device is a nightmare and it's never really been executed well which is why there is so much push towards online search. This isn't just about the processing power, it's about indexing ~60-80 million records per country, de-duping them and creating meaningful indexes (which are TB in size).

About the only thing that makes rational sense for offline maps is just that--the maps. With offline map data you can allow for gaps in data to be smoothly covered over and hypothetically you can use it to reduce the need to pull down data in the first place. Of course this assumes that the data updates can be pushed out in such a way that doesn't exceed the user's data usage of maps but this isn't such a big problem for map data since it is not as in flux as POI results.